Joe Cocker on repeat was torture. But suddenly, I could afford designer jeans

My first job was an after-school gig in a chicken shop when I was 15 years old. It wasn’t KFC, and it wasn’t Red Rooster. For the sake of the story, let’s call it Clucky Chicken.

Clucky Chicken was a small, independent, family-owned business in a main suburban street of Melbourne. Working in a chicken shop doesn’t sound glamorous – and it certainly wasn’t – but I was glad that I didn’t have to wear the perky trouser suits and baseball caps of a fast food chain.

There wasn’t much of a uniform at Clucky Chicken – just an old apron, over pants and a shirt from home. Plus, it gave me a start in the workforce.

Strangely I don’t remember being fazed by the greasy aspects of the job. I was just happy to earn money to buy trashy earrings, designer jeans, a perm hairdo and issues of Dolly magazine (it was the mid-1980s. I had simple needs).

Mostly, I had to scour gunk off the rotisserie rods, cut up roast chickens with pliers and hand-wash dishes in a deep sink and serve the odd customer. But my prime task as a junior, which I seemed to do for hours, was to mop grease from the tiled kitchen floor.

What I remember most from Clucky Chicken – it’s not a good memory – is the music that pervaded the small kitchen from the owner’s boom box.

A workmate had warned me of dire consequences if I changed the channel. Unfortunately, the radio was locked into a station that, even for the 80s, spewed out execrable, easy listening mush.

I love pop music, and I’m pretty broad-minded. But even now, I’m still scarred from listening so some of this pap. Most of my hostility towards the radio’s playlist of choice was caused by repetition. Was a monkey working as a DJ at this station? If so, he liked Lionel Richie’s Stuck on You, Elton John’s Nikita and Phil Collins’s In the Air Tonight. A truckload of Phil bloody Collins.

Songs in the Key of Naff should have been the radio station’s slogan. While I loved the Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes’ ballad Up Where We Belong the first 100 times I heard it, by the next 1000 times I hated it. When I heard Warnes’ shrill intro “Whooo knows what to-morrow brings...” I would feel like vomiting.

But it was another Jennifer, Jennifer Rush, whose song Power of Love, that really got my goat. The worst song in the world; it was akin to experiencing water torture. It was so treacly it made me want to listen to heavy metal music.

“Oh f--- orrrf,” I would mutter to myself every time the opening strains came on, which was seemingly every 15 minutes.

I always had to restrain myself from swiping the radio to the floor as that wobbly voice strained out the lyrics while the over-produced notes were probably making some morose, lonely truck driver cry out there blared on.

Even muzak versions of Gilbert O’Sullivan songs would have been better than this tripe. But I kept mopping, and consoled myself that I was toughening myself up for the real world, and I was right.

In 2024, shops are full of crappy pop blaring from the speakers. You cannot escape it, no matter how much you’d like to. You simply have to grit your teeth or sing along and laugh.

Even now, though, if I’m in the supermarket and I hear Up Where We Belong, Stuck On You or, God help me, Power of Love over the in-house radio sound system, look out. I’ll be the crazy lady running for the door, trying to get away.

Carolyn Webb is a reporter for The Age.

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